Perched on another's shoulders, Ryan Burtchell of Brooklyn, waves an American flag over the crowd near Ground Zero as they celebrate the news of Osama Bin Laden's death. (AP)
It was announced last night that Osama bin Laden had been killed inside his million dollar luxury compound in Pakistan (only a short distance from the Pakistani version of West Point Military Academy). Naturally, great rejoicing has ensued. Everyone has something to say about this event, so I am posting a few of the more interesting pieces I have had a chance to read this morning.My own response is subdued. I never like the "eye for an eye" form of "justice" - it's just revenge. And I really do not believe bin Laden's death will have too big an impact on al Qaeda - they are not a top-down organization the way nations are - they are more web-like, and I suspect that each node of the web has it's own leader who is planning and implementing terrorist attacks.
From Commentary, Reflections on the Death of bin Laden by Max Boot.The death of Osama bin Laden—richly deserved, long delayed—is certainly cause for celebration. But let’s not get carried away. The organization he built, al Qaeda, is likely resilient enough to continue without him. Certainly many of its regional affiliates, from Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, operated largely independently of their titular leader and will continue to do so. Then there are the numerous other Islamist terrorist organizations, such as Lashkar e Taiba and the Pakistani Taliban, which did not pledge even formal allegiance to “Emir” Osama. His death is an important symbolic blow against the Islamist terrorist network but not a fatal one; at most it might lead to the decline of Al Qaeda and the rise of other, competing organizations.
Some other thoughts on the Big News:
• The raid shows the importance of U.S. bases in Afghanistan—not only for keeping that country out of the clutches of the Taliban and other Al Qaeda allies, but also for projecting U.S. power into Pakistan which, despite bin Laden’s death, will remain a hotbed of radical Islamist activity. If it were not for the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, how could Seal Team Six have reached bin Laden’s compound deep in the heart of Pakistan? According to news accounts, they were using Chinook and Blackhawk helicopters, presumably the variants specially modified for special operations. But modified or not helicopters are short-range aircraft. Thus having guaranteed access to bases in Afghanistan is crucial to the success of such missions—as they are for Predator strikes and various intelligence-gathering activities which the CIA and other agencies undertake to monitor the situation in Pakistan.
The fact that bin Laden was able to live within sixty miles of Islamabad, and in a town where many retired Pakistani officers make their homes, shows how deep the rot has spread in Pakistan. The fallout from the raid, with U.S. troops operating in Pakistan without the permission of the government, may further radicalize Pakistan’s politics. That makes it all the more essential that we keep a significant force presence nearby. If not in Afghanistan, where? Unfortunately the Russians have done a good job of making Central Asia less hospitable to an American presence than it used to be. Hence the continuing importance of Afghanistan as a regional hub for American operations.
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From Rolling Stone, Julian Brookes: Bin Laden Dead; What's Next for Al Qaeda?
What does the death of Osama bin Laden mean for Al Qaeda? A sampling of early reactions:
NYU terrorism expert Paul Cruikshank: "The threat of al Qaeda won't go away anytime soon, as the thwarting of a serious al Qaeda plot against Germany last week demonstrated. Bin Laden's ideology has been spread too wide for that. But without the guiding hand of its founder, the al Qaeda organization may now begin to unravel." [CNN]
Counter-terrorism expert Daveed Gartenstein-Ross: "Bin Laden's death does not close this chapter in history. Two points are worth bearing in mind. First, bin Laden's strategic ideas for beating a superpower (which U.S. planners never fully understood) have permeated his organization, and are widely shared by al Qaeda's affiliates. Second, one critical lesson of 2001 is that we should not allow bin Laden's death to cause us to lose sight of the continued threat that al Qaeda poses." [Foreign Policy]
NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof: "[I]t is good for the United States reputation, power and influence that we finally got bin Laden. ... That said, killing bin Laden does not end Al Qaeda. Ayman al-Zawahri, the Egyptian No. 2, has long played a crucial role as Al Qaeda’s COO. And Al Qaeda is more of a loose network than a tightly structured organization, and that has become even more true in recent years.
"It’s also true that bin Laden’s killing might have mattered more in 2002 or 2003. Over time ... popular opinion has moved more against him, and you no longer see Osama t-shirts for sale in the markets." [NYT]
New Yorker writer John Lee Anderson: "Whatever else happens, and whatever baleful challenge will now be issued by Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s Egyptian deputy and presumed successor, Al Qaeda will have been weakened, perhaps terminally. With the death of their leader, the will of the many bin Laden wannabees out there in Pakistan and Yemen and Nottingham and wherever should be diminished—because one of the things that fueled them in the first place was his notional invincibility. Such vertical, quasi-religious death cults always rely upon the leader, because the leader’s survival is the key to perpetuating the belief that utopia is possible. ... Everyone will know, from now on, that Al Qaeda is probably ultimately doomed. It may continue to cause trouble, and even a great deal of it—the forces of jihadism are not finished in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, or in places like Yemen. But with bin Laden dead, it may be easier to see the way ahead; the end is, if not in sight, at least discernible, somewhere down the road." [New Yorker]
Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan: "The group's core leaders in and around Pakistan will likely seek to maintain a lower profile in the wake of their leader's death, officials suggest. The rest will likely try to use the event to raise more money and recruit more followers. The danger ... is that bin Laden's death may actually speed up the trend of recent years which has seen al Qaeda become increasingly decentralized, and therefore even harder to stop." [CBS]
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From The Daily Beast, Osama Bin Laden's Pakistan Haven by Asra Q. Nomani
To me, as an American Muslim, it’s significant that bin Laden is dead. American-Muslim groups zipped out statements through the night after news of his death: Muslims for Progressive Values said it “expresses great relief” at the death, saying, “Osama Bin Laden has singularly disgraced Islam and dragged our faith through the mud…” Islamic Information Center called him “one of the greatest enemies of Islam, if not the entire world.” American Islamic Forum for Democracy said it “applauds” the news.
For me, what’s as important, however, is where bin Laden was killed: the hill-station town of Abbottabad, Pakistan, in the heartland of Pakistan in the province of Khyber Paktunkhwa, a province formerly known as the Northwest Frontier Province. He wasn’t found in a cave in Tora Bora, Afghanistan, but rather in a comfortable home in a hill station that could be a mini-Colorado Springs, Colorado, of Pakistan, complete with a military academy, numerous military installations, a St. Luke’s church and the Taj Majal Cinema.
Bin Laden’s refuge in Pakistan speaks to the safe haven the nation has given to militants and terrorist operatives for decades and, most troubling, in recent years in a culture of denial that the U.S. has enabled in its prickly relationship with Pakistan. In making the announcement, Obama said America’s “friendship” with Pakistan allowed the operation to assassinate bin Laden, even thanking Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari.
As a journalist who has traveled Pakistan and tracked its links to militancy and terrorism, including the 2002 kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, I consider this sugarcoating just another chapter in America’s peculiar choice to pull its punches regarding a harsh but obvious reality: Pakistan has been a safe haven not only for bin Laden but for dozens of men involved in attacks on the U.S., including the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, whose ethnicity is rooted in the western Pakistani province of Baluchistan. For almost two years, I’ve been working a cultural trainer to the U.S. military, teaching that the U.S. must know the heartland of Pakistan, from Kara
chi, a teeming city where so many operatives hide, to places such as southern Punjab, the heart of the country and home to the “Punjabi Taliban” and the foot soldiers involved in Pearl’s kidnapping. As a journalist, I choose to do the cultural training, because I’ll never forget the name Pearl put on the last picture I have with him. We were in Karachi, and he called it, “Clueless in Karachi.”
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Here's the transcript of an off-the-record conference call held by senior administration officials—and moderated by White House press aide Tommy Vietor—minutes after President Barack Obama announced that Osama bin Laden had been killed by US special forces:
MR. VIETOR: Thank you, everyone, for joining us, especially so late. We wanted to get you on the line quickly with some senior administration officials to talk about the operation today regarding Osama bin Laden. And with that I’ll turn it over to our first senior administration official.
SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Thanks for joining us, everybody, at this late hour. It’s much appreciated. From the outset of the administration, the President has placed the highest priority in protecting the nation from the threat of terrorism. In line with this, we have pursued an intensified, targeted, and global effort to degrade and defeat al Qaeda. Included in this effort has been a relentless set of steps that we’ve taken to locate and bring Osama bin Laden to justice. Indeed, in the earliest days of the administration, the President formally instructed the intelligence community and his counterterrorism advisors to make the pursuit of Osama bin Laden, as the leader of al Qaeda, as a top priority.
In the beginning of September of last year, the CIA began to work with the President on a set of assessments that led it to believe that in fact it was possible that Osama bin Laden may be located at a compound in Pakistan. By mid-February, through a series of intensive meetings at the White House and with the President, we had determined there was a sound intelligence basis for pursuing this in an aggressive way and developing courses of action to pursue Osama bin Laden at this location.
In the middle of March, the President began a series of National Security Council meetings that he chaired to pursue again the intelligence basis and to develop courses of action to bring justice to Osama bin Laden. Indeed, by my count, the President chaired no fewer than five National Security Council meetings on the topic from the middle of March -- March 14th, March 29th, April 12th, April 19th, and April 28th. And the President gave the final order to pursue the operation that he announced to the nation tonight on the morning -- Friday morning of April 29th.
The President mentioned tonight that the pursuit of Osama bin Laden and the defeat of al Qaeda has been a bipartisan exercise in this nation since September 11, 2001, and indeed, this evening before he spoke to the nation, President Obama did speak to President Bush 43 and President Clinton this evening to review with them the events of today and to preview his statement to the nation tonight.
And with that, I’ll turn it over to my colleague to go through some of the details. Thank you.
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